Who’s Behind the Counter: Charlie Strouse at Adventure Web Productions

Catonsville Patch:  How long have you been in business in Catonsville?

Charlie Strouse:  My partner, Craig Kahl, and I opened Adventure Web Productions in 1997.  We had two other employees in a 1,200 square-foot office at Rolling Crossroads.  We’ve been here, over the Sun Trust Bank, for about ten years, and now we’re outgrowing this space.  We have twenty, full-time employees and are looking to hire.

Patch:  Why did you choose Catonsville? 

Strouse:  Born and raised, both of us.  We both live five minutes from here.

Patch:  What do you like about being in Catonsville?

Strouse: There’s a ton of sound, small businesses in this little city.  Craig and I have a lot of contacts here; we do a fair amount of business locally, but we also have national and international clients.  We’ve done websites literally from across the street to Japan.

Patch:  Other than growing, how else has your business changed over time?

Strouse:  In our first few years, I knocked on 100 doors a day, I went to every industrial park in Maryland, and I was teaching people about the internet and explaining how a website could benefit their business.  Now, everything has exploded, we are more of a marketing company than a design company.  We can’t just design a pretty website anymore; we have to get it high in the search engines; we have to manage social media; we are blogging for our clients.

Patch:  What services do you do?

Strouse:  We are a full-service, custom website developer.  So that means we cover every aspect of internet marketing from website design to managed social media to search engine optimization to hosting.  We are a service business; it’s all about the people.

Patch:  What’s a typical day like?

Strouse:  We have 60-70 projects under construction at any given time.  Nobody’s twiddling their thumbs around here.  There’s a certain mindset; we work hard and we play hard.  We might be in the office until midnight meeting a deadline, but we also incentivize our employees with cruises and dinners out with their spouses.  Last year we were nominated by the Baltimore Business Journal as one of the best places to work.

Patch:  Do you have a signature service or specialty thing you do?

Strouse:  We pride ourselves on hand-holding.  Everyone gets the same level of attention.

Patch:  What’s one of the hardest things about your work?

Strouse:  That’s a tough question; it’s all exciting and fun, but I guess the hardest thing is juggling multiple projects with multiple developers.  We have meetings every Monday when we prioritize the most important things we have to accomplish in the week, and we have to have a team effort to bring a project to completion.

Patch:  What are you proud of?

Strouse:  We get a lot of recognition for the quality of our work.  We consistently win awards from the Baltimore Business Journal for the area’s best web design firms.  We are going to a black tie affair on Monday for the area’s top 100 best run companies.

But I am most proud of the people we work with.  We make sure that we have great people.

Patch:  What’s your favorite thing about your work?

Strouse:  I love seeing the websites come to life.  From the initial meeting to seeing the site live on the internet is such a complicated journey, but our wall of fame is covered with literally hundreds of letters from our clients who say that our work exceeded their expectations.

Patch:  Where is the business going from here?

Strouse:  The traditional PC is becoming obsolete.  Soon everyone will have a smart phone or tablet, so we’re developing for mobile technologies and creating mobile applications.  It’s very exciting and we’re helping businesses have a medium where they can engage their customers anywhere, any time.

Patch:  What is one thing you think is needed in the business community?

Strouse:  This is not in the business realm.  I coach my 5 and 8 year olds’ baseball teams, and I would love to see the community embrace baseball.  We need more fields and better fields so that we can compete with the likes of Howard County. Right now we lost a field behind to the trailers, and so we have to pay St. Timothy’s to use their fields.

Patch:  What's the best piece of advice that someone has given you when it comes to running a business? 

Strouse:  I read a quote from a graduation speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005, and it struck me that it really said a lot about the people here at Adventure Web:  “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”